TAN: Web 2.0 & Information Literacy

Several of us from the library attended the Teaching Assessment Network presentation yesterday by Sarah Whittaker and Alan Cann.

The slides with an audio commentary for this session can be found in a previous post.

The session mainly consisted of a face to face and simultaneous twitter discussion about using Web 2.0 technologies in teaching, particularly with regards to information literacy skills.

I don’t have a particular problem twittering while listening/discussing issues face to face. However,  it wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea and some people had problems hearing the face verbal discussion due to the tapping of keyboards and/or concentrating on the online discussion due to the amount of tangential “twittering”.

Some of the interesting points I picked up in the room and online were:

• Web 2.0 tools used included a customised google search engine, wikis, and a pageflakes page for relevant journal links and RSS feeds. All bought together through the Blackboard VLE page for the course.
• As the students saw each other daily anyway there was very little interaction online.
• The custom search and the journal pages were very popular with the students.
• The tutor saw an improvement in the quality of resources used.
• suggests it’s best to integrate appropriate Web 2.0 info literacy tools within student courses.
• Academis staff were offered library sessions on RSS and social bookmarking but take up was low – they didn’t come because they didn’t know how it would be useful?
• The library needs to expand on our Web 2.0 knowledge and the support we offer – need web 2.0 evangelists?
• More emphasis on evaluation – less on searching?
• Issues to think about teaching: advanced google searching, specialist image/audio search engines, wikipedia, youtube as reference tool, RSS, blogs/blog searching, citing new types of resources and copyright/creative commons.

Session for 1st Year Computer Scientists

As previously mentioned I’ll be doing a new session for 1st year computer scientists.

This is my draft session so far, feedback encouraged!

CO1007 Session: Finding, Collecting & Sharing Resources
• Session for approx 50 1st yr Com Sci students in wk 5 of term, based in a computer lab.
• To be taught via a wiki – a strategy used effectively by a colleague at Loughborough with 1st yr Comp Sci students.
o http://jil.lboro.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/JIL/article/view/RA-V1-I3-2007-1
• Wiki will allow online interaction between students during the session and hopefully promote reflective thinking.
• Library catalogue will be covered in normal 1st yr induction (10am Fri 3rd Oct), so this session will concentrate on online resources.

Activities/Prompts within the Wiki:

1. Wikipedia – what is it good for?
• Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page and search for Computer Ethics
• What do you find useful about Wikipedia? What are the problems with Wikipedia?
• You may find it useful to read – strengths, weaknesses & article quality in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About#Strengths.2C_weaknesses.2C_and_article_quality_in_Wikipedia • Post a Pro & Con to the wiki
o E.g. Pro: covers a huge amount of topics
o E.g. Con: only covers some topics superficially

2. What’s the best search engine for you?
• Use your favourite search engine to find information on plagiarism in computer science
• Why do you like this search engine? Did you find some useful results?
• Post your findings to the wiki
• Now try a different search engine, such as scholar.google.co.uk or www.scirus.com, which are scholarly and scientific search engines.
• How did these search engines compare to your favourite? Did you find different results?
• Post your findings to the wiki

3. How do you collect and share resources with friends?
• Create an account on http://delicious.com/ using your CFS username, in order to save links that are useful for this course.
• Go to my delicious account http://delicious.com/STLock (need to create) and add me to your network.
• You will see I have tagged a number of resources CO1007, which I think you will find useful for this course.
• Add a resource you think will be useful to your account and tag it CO1007
• Post your delicious account name to the wiki so that others can add you to their network and vice versa
• Do you think it will be useful to build up a list of shared resources like this? Do you think you might use it for other courses?
• Post your thoughts/comments to the wiki
• Delicious is the most popular, but not the only, social bookmarking tool available. There are others that are aimed at researchers and scientists, such as http://www.citeulike.org/ and http://www.connotea.org/

4. An exercise on Google Reader?
5. An exercise on recommended journals?

What Web 2.0 technologies should libraries be teaching?

For the first time this coming academic year I will be teaching an information skills session to 1st year computer scientists. This is likely to be challenging as they tend to think that the library resources are not relevant to their subject and that they know how to search the net.

I’m thinking I might use a wiki which has been primed with exercises for them to complete and feedback on during the session as described in this paper; http://jil.lboro.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/JIL/article/view/RA-V1-I3-2007-1

So, the next question is what exercises should I use in the wiki? The Department expects the students to mainly use websites and books. Plus a couple of journals that have articles appropriate to 1st years.

I’m thinking that they need to also be discussing different types of online sources such as wikipedia and blogs. So, as part of that do I include social bookmarking and RSS feed readers? It’s only a 2 hour session so I’ll only be able to include so much.